Jan Victors portrays ḥaliṣah in Ruth 4, the ritual of absolving one of levirate marriage obligations through the exchange of a shoe.

Jan Victors portrays ḥaliṣah in Ruth 4, the ritual of absolving one of levirate marriage obligations through the exchange of a shoe.

One of the most prominent examples of the relevance of and enduring interest in ancient texts is the daf yomi cycle, in which participants read a folio (or daf) of the Babylonian Talmud a day for more than 7 years, until they complete the entire Babylonian Talmud.

The number of daf yomi participants has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and has also expanded demographically beyond Orthodox Jewish men to women and people of all denominations (and faiths). To aid them in their lengthy and dedicated journey, we will produce a brief bibliography of major academic reference works and secondary works a few weeks before one tractate is completed and participants move on to the next.

But rather than wait until tractate Ketubot, we decided to belatedly produce a bibliography of Yevamot!

Secondary Works:

For a general overview of Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, see Michael Satlow's aptly named Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton University Press, 2001).

Dvora Weisberg, Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism (University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 2009). For a shorter article just on the Bavli that covers a number of sugyot, see eadem, “The Babylonian Talmud’s Treatment of Levirate Marriage,” Annual of Rabbinic Literature 3 (2000): 35-66.

Richard Kalmin provides a comparative analysis of the story of the Ascension of Isaiah in b. Yevamot 49b-50a in Chapter 1 of his new book Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context (University of California Press, 2014): 29-52. [See the video review of his book here!]

Is there a source you find helpful, useful, or essential that isn’t on the list? Please add it in the comments below, and we will integrate them into the post itself (and give the requisite hat-tipping recognition).